Apple has been ahead of Google in terms of audio latency for years, and I think it is fair to say that Google’s disadvantage is largely because of huge ecosystem of devices running Android, and because of so many manufacturers of the devices. Apple on the other hand has had their own devices and their own OS for years, so it was easier for them to flesh things out.

Google has been working quite actively on reducing the latency over last few years. They introduced AAudio (https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/audio/index.html) that they can develop and control (unlike OpenSL) and quite recently they have been working on Oboe to simplify audio apps development and further benefit from audio path improvements: https://github.com/google/oboe. Oboe will use AAudio on Android 8.0 or above and OpenSL otherwise. Then, on Android 8.1 Google further improved the audio path by introducing “exclusive” mode. Here is a video from last Audio Developer Conference, where they present Oboe in practise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjgfje52Yv0

Hardware-wise, Google created Pixel phones which are the first to have good audio performance on Android and our app NOISE at the moment is only supported on Pixel on Android for this reason (unlike on iOS where we support much more devices). You can have a look at Mobile Audio Quality Index we introduced not long ago to have a comparison between devices: https://juce.com/maq